Our Dancing Feet - Winter Garden Devonshire Park Talks at Eastbourne Heritage Centre (Maj 2024)
Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) tillkännagav sin tvärvetenskapliga utställning 2016, ”Dance! American Art 1830–1960, ”som den första stora showen för att utforska den rika och varierade relationen som amerikanska konstnärer hade haft med rörelse, rytm och kroppen. Tillsammans med mer än 90 konstverk av så välkända konstnärer som George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, Andy Warhol, Isamu Noguchi och Jasper Johns, innehöll utställningen (20 mars – 12 juni 2016) kostymer och fotografier samt en video program av dansföreställningar. Ytterligare programmering förde dans direkt in i gallerierna, med "Dancing in the DIA" -händelser som inkluderade demonstrationer och föreställningar och "kreativa rörelser" -klasser under välvda tak i museets stora hall. Utställningen reste till Denver Art Museum,där det fungerade (10 juli – 2 oktober) som centrum i ”A Summer of Movement & Rhythm,” och sedan på hösten öppnades (22 oktober) på Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark., där det skulle kvar till 16 januari 2017. Denna sömlösa integration av visuell konst och dansföreställning markerade en ny utveckling i en pågående trend.
År 2016 presenterade många museer dansföreställningar i sina gallerier, en återspegling av en decadelong-trend i dansrelaterade program på dessa arenor. Även om museer ofta var outrustade för repetitioner och kostymförändringar, gav de utmärkta utrymmen för att uppleva levande dans i närheten av konstverk och andra samlingar.
Det mest spektakulära projektet under 2015 inträffade i maj då Boris Charmatz, den franska regissören för Musée de la Danse (även kallad Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne) i två dagar, samarbetade med cirka 90 dansare och koreografer för att förvandla Londons Tate Modern (TM) till ett "dansmuseum." Titeln på Charmatzs arbete var också en fråga: "Om Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse?" Som svar på frågan flyttade Charmatz dans från studioens insulära värld och scenen till konstmuseets mer allmänna rike. Evenemanget inkluderade en "liveutställning" med föreläsningar och en föreställning där volontärer lärde sig en version av Charmatzs dans Levée des conflits, som hade premiär 2010.En virtuell komponent gjorde det möjligt för publiken att svara på Charmatzs utredning via sociala medier medan en live-stream-video överförde föreställningar i realtid.
Longer lived but no less ambitious was the two-week exhibition “P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange),” held in February 2015 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NMCA) in New York City. Gerard & Kelly (artistic partners Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) created the show during a six-month Research and Development residency at the NMCA. The artists placed two 4.9-m (16-ft) brass poles in a gallery, where the supports functioned as physical props for dancers and conceptual provocations for viewers. Several live events occurred during the exhibition. For Gerard & Kelly’s score-based piece Two Brothers, a pair of dancers from a revolving group of eight performed on the poles three times per day. The artists, ranging from an exotic dancer to a fitness instructor, displayed their mastery of various movement styles. In addition, an “Open Pole” program, coinciding with the NMCA’s free evenings, offered public pole-dancing classes. The last two sessions culminated with virtuoso improvisations by two crews of subway dancers, the Chosen Ones and We Live This.
The museum and gallery performances in 2015 recalled avant-garde dance productions of the past. In the 1960s and’70s, the Americans Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, members of Judson Dance Theater (JDT), spearheaded a movement that explored pedestrian gestures and took dance outside the theatre. Members of JDT, motivated by financial constraints and aesthetic concerns, performed at low-cost nontraditional venues such as Judson Memorial Church in New York City’s Greenwich Village, for which the group was named. During the 1970s Brown held a residency at the Walker Art Center (WAC) in Minneapolis, Minn., and Paxton danced at the John Weber Gallery in New York City. In similar fashion the Canadian duo Lily Eng and Peter Dudar, known by the moniker Missing Associates, performed in Toronto art spaces as part of the city’s first wave of experimental dance during the 1970s and’80s.
Contemporary art spaces were used in 2015 to revisit Brown’s and Paxton’s careers. Trisha Brown Dance Company, directed by Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas since 2013, performed five of its namesake’s most-acclaimed pieces alongside Minimalist artworks by Donald Judd and his contemporaries at New York City’s Judd Foundation. Dia Art Foundation presented the two-weekend program “Steve Paxton: Selected Works” at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y. For Paxton’s staging of the solo Flat (1964), the choreographer selected three dancers to reinterpret the role simultaneously amid colourful scrap-metal sculptures by the American artist John Chamberlain.
Another maverick American dance maker, Merce Cunningham, maintained a long-standing relationship with the WAC. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), which disbanded in 2011, first performed at the WAC in 1963. During his 67-year career, Cunningham held nine WAC residencies, and his company performed at the cross-disciplinary venue 17 times. In 2011, two years after Cunningham’s death, the WAC acquired the MCDC’s collection of costumes, sets, and other objects, many of which were created by the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 2012–13 the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) featured the exhibition “Dancing Around the Bride,” an exploration of works that Cunningham and his collaborators, including Rauschenberg and Johns, produced under the influence of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. The PMA not only displayed two- and three-dimensional artworks but also showcased some of Cunningham’s repertory by hosting what he called “Events”—sequences of short excerpts from his choreography originally chosen and ordered by the roll of dice but here curated by British dancer Daniel Squire.
Natural history and fashion museums embraced dance too. Visually arresting and packing a powerful message, Karole Armitage’s ballet On the Nature of Things enlivened the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Armitage set her meditation on climate change to music as well as to text read by American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Members of Armitage Gone! Dance (AGD) and children from the Manhattan Youth Ballet explored the interrelatedness of humans and nature by performing with a 28.7-m (94-ft) model of a blue whale suspended above them. Armitage also placed her choreography in dialogue with wall labels and illuminated dioramas that contained marine life and a polar bear. In other AGD news, American art dealer Jeffrey Deitch curated “Making Art Dance: Backdrops and Costumes from the Armitage Foundation.” The show, which opened in December 2014, surveyed costumes and sets that visual artists and fashion designers crafted for AGD between 1978 and 2014. Likewise, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City spotlighted nearly 100 dance costumes and outfits in “Dance & Fashion,” an exhibition that opened in September 2014.
Two 2014 projects demonstrated a dynamic interplay between dance and the visual arts. Shen Wei, a Chinese-born American choreographer and painter, displayed his multidisciplinary talents in the exhibition “In Black, White and Gray,” sponsored by Miami Dade College’s (MDC’s) Museum of Art + Design and MDC Live Arts. For his gesamtkunstwerk Wei combined a series of 11 large-scale paintings with five performances of site-specific dance. Wei’s troupe moved in response to the sweeping marks described by his paintings’ forms. In Boston dancer-choreographer Trajal Harrell along with Christina Vasileiou performed the duet The Untitled Still Life Collection at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Harrell and contemporary artist Sarah Sze developed the piece, in which thread plays a central role, for ICA’s interdisciplinary show “Dance/Draw” in 2010. Among the most-memorable images on view at “Dance/Draw” was Mexican American artist Juan Capistrán’s The Breaks (2001). The grid-shaped work, an assemblage of 25 colour photographs, depicts Capistrán performing 24 classic break-dance steps on a sculpture by Carl Andre. While Andre meant for museumgoers to experience his floor pieces with their eyes as well as their feet (i.e., to walk on them), Capistrán surreptitiously transgressed museum rules and challenged Andre’s intentions by busting a move on the metal artwork at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2015 museum employees also joined in on the action. The author of the Tumblr page “When You Work at a Museum” chose to offer for its annual competition a video dance-off in galleries and work spaces that pitted 28 international teams against one another. Online voters awarded the staff of Ontario’s Orillia Museum of Art & History the top prize for its rendition of Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” while a Judge’s Choice Award went to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History crew for its interpretation of M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”
For years French artist Edgar Degas’s visually inventive representations of ballerinas constituted some of the foremost exemplars of dance in museums. Recent events, however, demonstrated a renewed enthusiasm among audiences for watching and sometimes even participating in live dance in the galleries.
